Articles Tagged with Chef

There are a number of companies that are in a race to own the enterprise landscape when it comes to infrastructure automation and development pipelines (aka continuous integration and continuous deployment). What is unfolding here is very similar to what we have witnessed in the cloud market.

Welcome to The Virtualization Practice’s week-long coverage of VMworld US 2015. Tune in all week for our daily recap of the major announcements and highlights from the world’s premier virtualization and cloud conference.

With all the forward-looking business out of the way (see the Day 1, Day 2, and Day 3 recaps), VMworld took a breath yesterday and focused on other parts of the ecosystem. The first annual Developer Day was held as part of the VMworld DevOps program track, and it included a Hackathon where coders and non-coders could compete for prizes. Non-coders had a series of increasingly difficult challenges to complete. Coders worked to create the most useful, creative, and complex tools and services on vCloud Air, judged at the end of the day, and were awarded prizes like a guitar signed by Alabama Shakes and the Neon Trees, the VMworld Party bands.

I had the privilege of attending #ChefConf 2014 in San Francisco last week. The theme of the event was “Delivering Delight.” The Chef speakers came out pumped up. They were loud, like the heavy metal music that played in the background (see playlist here), dropping f-bombs as adjectives to emphasize how jacked up they were about their new features and the packed, three-day agenda. They were also very funny, as you can see in the following video on DevOps featuring Chef Technical Community Manager Nathen Harvey. (Beware of the curse words, and don’t play this at work without headphones.)

The DevOps movement is gaining more momentum each day. But like any other popular buzzword, many companies will follow the hype and try to run before they can walk. Here are five common signs that should raise a red flag that the DevOps initiative is on a path for failure.

Almost every company in this day and age is trying to figure out how to become more agile. Now that infrastructure can be delivered as software, I am seeing a lot of innovation around the automation of environments. One of the most interesting innovations that I have seen is Docker. Docker is a Linux container engine that is simplifying the process of delivering environments.

In the world of DevOps, the names Chef and Puppet have been synonymous with systems and configuration management in the cloud. But now it is time to make room for a third synonym, Salt. Salt, short for SaltStack, was started in the basement of Founder and CTO Tom Hatch. Tom had been building and administering clouds for a while and was frustrated with some of the complexities and performance issues of the existing tools that he was working with. Tom set out to create a framework that could get real-time information about infrastructure and communicate to servers faster than anything out there. Writing in Python, Tom built a framework that executes many times faster than the competition. In fact one client reported that moving to Salt took the previous deployment process of 18,000 nodes from 15 minutes down to 5 seconds.